04 Nov 09

During the past year I’ve undertaken a number of large-scale projects related to my photography and teaching. Much of the work is new to me; I’m on unfamiliar ground a lot of the time and have often struggled with the various processes involved.

As a result, I’ve intermittently been feeling overwhelmed, stressed-out, anxious… whatever label you give it, feeling like this sucks. I sometimes wonder if I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, and begin to doubt my ability to succeed in reaching my goals.

Fortunately, thanks to my very strong support system of friends and family (and some great books), I’ve been able to repeatedly bring myself back down to earth and into a calmer state of mind, which in turn allows me to refocus, get back on track and keep working effectively on my projects.

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep at night, I find my mind running endlessly over my to-do lists – which seem to be ever-growing! When this happens, one of the new habits I’ve developed to counter it is to let my mind work over the following list I created to ease my anxiety. I figure if I’m going to obsess on something, it should be more like zen meditation, and I’ve found this has a very calming effect. In fact, sometimes it’s helped me get a good night’s sleep when nothing else worked! (more…)

25 Jun 09

There is a lot of information floating around about how to be successful [in business] as a photographer. Whether you are just starting photography as a hobby or shooting every day for clients, you need to adopt some basic practices to secure yourself and your work against catastrophe. Here is some info about protecting your most valuable assets:

2. File Backups
After every work session, synchronize two or three hard drives so you have mirror copies of all your files. If you don’t use RAID (I don’t), there are software utilities that make this easy; On Mac I use ChronoSync; on Windows I use RoboCopy. (more…)